Cognitive robotics (CR) is concerned with endowing robots with high-level cognitive capabilities to enable the achievement of complex goals in complex environments using limited
computational resources. Robotic cognitive capabilities include perception processing, attention allocation, anticipation, planning, reasoning about other agents, and reasoning about their own mental states. Robotic cognition embodies the behaviour of intelligent agents in the physical world (or a virtual world, in the case of simulated CR).

A number of different methodologies can be adopted within cognitive robotics, including not only the approach of classical symbolic AI - emphasizing symbolic reasoning and representation - but also more biologically-inspired approaches that draw on neuroscience and studies of animal behaviour.